MCJ 307: International Communication

Sixth Semester 2020

Mass Communication and Journalism

University of Dhaka
Disjuncture and Difference in the Global
Cultural Economy

Arjun Appadurai
Arjun Appadurai (social anthropologist)
Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University

Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization

(1996) [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press]

The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition

(2013) [New York: Verso]
Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

• The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between

cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.

• Subspecies of homogenization argument – Americanization and

‘commoditization’

• This argument fails to recognize the indigenization process of foreign cultural

materials (e.g. music, housing style, terrorism).
• For the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianization is more worrisome than
Americanization.

• For Koreans, Japanization is more worrisome than Americanization.

• For Sri Lankans, Indianization is more worrisome than Americanization.

• For Cambodians, Vietnamization is more worrisome than Americanization.

• For the people of Soviet Armenia and Baltic Republics, Russianization is

more worrisome than Americanization.
• The simplification of these many forces (and fears) of homogenization
can also be exploited by nation-states in relation to their own minorities.

• The new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex,

overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in
terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account
for multiple centers and peripheries).
• The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain
fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics.

• An elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at

the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flow which
can be termed as:
1. ethnoscapes 2. mediascapes
3. Technoscapes 4. financescapes
5. ideoscapes
• These landscapes are the building blocks of ‘imagined worlds’, that is,
the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated
imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe.

• The suffix scape also allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of
these landscapes, shapes which characterize international capital as
deeply as they do international clothing style.
 Ethnoscape
• The landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live:
tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and
persons constitute an essential feature of the world.

• They affect the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.

• Men and women from villages in India think not just of moving to Poona or
Madras, but of moving to Dubai and Houston.

• Refugees from Sri Lanka find themselves in South India as well as in Canada.

• Hmong people are driven to London as well as to Philadelphia.

• An example of ethnoscapes is Australia – a multi-ethnic country with one of the
most linguistically and culturally diverse populations in the world.

• Immigrants and their offspring account for 40 percent of the Australian population.

• Economically speaking, migrants make a huge contribution to Australia’s economy.

• International education industry contributed $21 billion to the Australian economy

(Department of Education and Training 2016).

• On the other hand, immigration raises the unemployment rate in Australia as it

causes native Australians to miss out on jobs that are taken up by immigrants.
 Technoscapes

• The global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology, and of the fact
that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational,
now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious
boundaries.

• Many countries are now the roots of multinational enterprise: a huge steel
complex in Libya may involve interests from India, China, Russia and
Japan, providing different components of new technological
configurations.
• The odd distribution of technologies, and thus the peculiarities of these
technoscapes, are increasingly driven not by any obvious economies of
scale, of political control, or of market rationality, but of increasingly
complex relationships between money flows, political possibilities and
the availability of both low and highly-skilled labor.

• While India exports waiters and drivers to Dubai and Sharjah, it also
exports software engineers to the United States.
 Financescapes

• The disposition of global capital is now a mysterious, rapid and

difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as currency markets,
national stock exchanges and commodity speculations move
megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed.

• The global relationship between ethnoscapes, technoscapes and

financescapes is deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable.

• Each of these landscapes is subject to its own constraints and

incentives. At the same time each acts as a constraint and a parameter
for movements in the other.
 Mediascapes

• Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic

capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers,
magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc.) and to
the images of the world created by these media.

• They provide (especially in their television, film and cassette

forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and
‘ethnoscapes’ to viewers throughout the world, in which the world
of commodities and the world of ‘news’ and politics are
profoundly mixed.
 Ideoscapes

• Ideoscapes are also images but they are often directly political
and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the
counter ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing
state power or a piece of it.

• These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment

world-view, which consists of a concatenation of ideas, terms and
images, including ‘freedom’, ‘welfare’, ‘right’, ‘sovereignty’,
‘representation’ and the master-term ‘democracy’.
 Ideoscapes

• The master-narrative of the Enlightenment was constructed with a

certain internal logic and presupposed a certain relationship between
reading, representation and the public sphere.

• But their diaspora across the world, especially since 19th century, has
loosened the internal coherence.

• Instead, it provided a loosely structured synopticon of politics, in

which different nation-states have organized their political cultures
around different ‘keywords’.
 Ideoscapes
• The use of these words by political actors and their audiences may
be subject to very different sets of conventions that mediate their
translation into public politics.

• So, while an Indian audience may be attentive to the resonances of

a political speech in terms of some key words and phrases
reminiscent of Hindi cinema, a Korean audience may respond to
the subtle codings of Buddhists or neo-Confucian rhetorical
strategy encoded in a political document.
• Current global flows occur in and through the growing
disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes,
mediascapes and ideoscapes.